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Radcliffe Squires
James Radcliffe Squires (May 5, 1917 - February 14, 1993) was an American poet, prose writer, literary critic, and academic. He published several well-regarded books of poetry, plus biographical and critical works which focused on well-known 20th-century writers. Life Youth and education Squires was born on May 5, 1917, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the son of a barber. Squires earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Utah in 1940. He served in the Navy during World War II, and completed his graduate studies after the war at the University of Chicago, where he co-founded the literary magazine Chicago Review in 1946, and earned a master's degree. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1952. Career After teaching at Dartmouth College, in 1952 Squires became an instructor of English language and literature at the University of Michigan, where he taught for 30 years. Following his retirement in 1982, Squires continued to teach seminars for freshman students, and remained active as an essayist and reviewer.David Mason, Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry in English (edited by Ian Hamilton). Oxford University Press, 1994. Print His work appeared in various magazines, such as the New Republic, Hudson Review, Poetry, Paris Review, and Sewanee Review. Squires was also the author of 7 books of poetry, a novel, and numerous critical books and essays. He also served as the editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review. Radcliffe Squires died in 1993 of an abdominal aneurysm at Ann Arbor University Hospital in Michigan at the age of 75. He outlived his wife, the former Eileen Mulholland, who died in 1976.Obituary of Radcliffe Squires, University of Michigan Record, March 1, 1993. Print. Writing “Squires' poetry focused on the western United States, especially the area around Utah where he was born and raised, and on the world of classical Greece," said University of Michigan English professor Laurence Goldstein. "His short lyrics favor mountain landscape and metaphysical speculation, and his long narrative poems concern the legendary figures of Beowulf, Hercules and Daedalus. "His critical books, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers and The Major Themes of Robert Frost, were important early evaluations of the two poets, and his critical study, Allen Tate: A literary biography, remains the standard survey of Tate's writings." Literary criticism Squires produced a critical study of Robert Frost, a biography of Frederic Prokosch, and a pioneering volume about Robinson Jeffers. All earlier books on Jeffers had been written by people associated with the poet. Squires also authored an early in-depth study of Allen Tate, Allen Tate: A literary biography (1971), and edited an important collection of essays, Allen Tate and His Work, ''published in 1972. Squires compared the aim of Tate’s diverse achievements as essayist, novelist, and poet, to a simple physics experiment in which students are taught the principles of pressure. Squires wrote: "The synergy of Allen Tate's poetry, fiction, and essays has had the aim of applying pressure — think of the embossed, bitterly stressed lines, his textured metaphors — until it brings up before our eyes a blanched parody of the human figure, which is our evil, the world's evil, so that we begin to long for God. That has seemed to him a worthwhile task to perform for modern man threatened by such fatal narcissism, such autotelic pride that he is in danger of disappearing into a glassy fantasy of his own concoction. We shall need his help for a long time to come.”Squires, Radcliffe, "Allen Tate and his Work", University of Minnesota Press, 1972. Poetry In a review of his early poems, poet Anne Stevenson wrote that "all Squires' poems share common properties — wit, thought, and a philosophy of nature in which Man is a sacred, yet ruinous intrusion."Squires Obituary, Michigan Record In the ''Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry, poet David Mason wrote that "The mannered formality of his early verse has given way to poems that are powerfully evocative of travel as travail, a struggle for knowledge and insight in a world often mysteriously cruel...Squires has written about America, Greece, and Spain, and many of his best poems are unassumingly personal, such as the powerful sequence from Journeys (1983) in which, after the death of his wife in 1976, he faces the shattering prospect of a life without love."Mason, p. 514 ''Where the Compass Spins'' When Squires's Where the Compass Spins appeared in 1951, John Holmes commented in the New York Times that in writing about "his family, a football game, the movies, a subway ride...Squires lifts these things to unforgettable importance" Richard Eberhart, writing in the Kenyon Review, mentioned the poetry's "elegant sophistication... the moods of delicate and bitter poignancy, the sense of long regarded places, subtle relationships." Eberhart concluded: "He writes (one would almost say 'Keatsian' sometimes of him) with insight... and can rise... to tones reminiscent of Hart Crane." "Interior Blurb of Radcliffe Squires, Fingers of Hermes, Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Gardens of the World Gardens of the World (1981) is generally considered to be Squires finest volume. Reviewing it in The Hudson Review, Dana Gioia wrote : "Nothing in Radcliffe Squires's first five books of poetry will have prepared readers for Gardens of the World. Somehow at the age of sixty-three, long after the point when most writers settle into comfortable repetition, this little-known poet has focused all of his talent into one stunning and original collection."Gioia, pp 176–177 Poet and philosopher Emily Grosholz commented in the New England Review on the collection's poetic meditations on the landscape of the American West: “he brings us to the level, not of sentient creatures, but of rocks, dust and barren earth, finding in what is dead something fr more important than life, which is moreover the hidden spring of life. Thus he confounds our thoughtlessly held distinctions between life and death, spirit and matter.” Writing on the volume’s last nine poems, Grosholz concludes they “are extraordinarily sophisticated variations on the theme of gardens, which are...figurae for the imagination.”Grosholz, Emily, Writing Landscape, New England Review (1978–1982) Vol. 3, No. 4 (Summer, 1981), pp. 604–616 Published by: Middlebury College Publications Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40355609 John Ciardi wrote in The Western Humanities Review: "I venture the guess that many of these poems must endure as long as English poems are read... I think,,, that when the time has had a chance to sift the chaff from the cliques Radcliffe Squires will come to be recognized asa one of the most valid singers of life now at work among us."Blurb from Fingers of Hermes Critical reception Although well esteemed in his lifetime, Squires never enjoyed literary celebrity. His poetry was widely reviewed, but his poems were rarely anthologized. He did not win any major awards, but his work, especially his later volumes of verse, attracted powerful advocates, including poet and critic Dana Gioia, and poets Anne Stevenson, David Mason, and Emily Grosholz. Gioia wrote in 1992: “Squires deserves consideration as one of the finest American poets writing today.”Gioia, Dana, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on American Poetry and Culture, Graywolf Press, 1992 Recognition Squires read a number of his poems for audio recording and historical preservation at the Library of Congress on April 18, 1977, as part of the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, sponsored by the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund. Publications Poetry *''Cornar''. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1940. *''Where the Compass Spins''. New York: Twayne, 1951. *''Fingers of Hermes: Poems''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1965. *''The Light Under Islands''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1967. *''Daedalus''. Ann Arbor, MI: Generation, 1968. *''New Year's Day at the End of a Decade''. Cummington, MA: Cummington Press, 1972. *''Waiting in the Bone, and other poems'' (illustrated by Keith Achepohl). Omaha, NE: Abattoir Editions, 1973. *''The First Day out from Troy: A poem''. Omaha, NE: Cummington Press, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1974. *''Gardens of the World: Poems''. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. *''Journeys''. New York: Elysian Press, 1983. *''The Envoy''. Winston-Salem, NC: Palaemon Press, 1983. *''Selected Poems, 1950-1985'' (selected with introduction by Donald Beagle). Winston-Salem, NC: Library Partners Press, 2017. and an afterword by Theodore Haddin) Non-fiction *''The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961. *''Frederic Prokosch'' New Haven, CT: College & University Press, 1964; New York: Twayne (Twayne's United States Authors) 1964. *''The Major Themes of Robert Frost''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1964. *''Allen Tate: A Literary biography''. New York: Pegasus, 1971. *''Allen Tate and His Work: Critical evaluations''. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1972. Except where noted, bibliographical information couresy WorldCat.Search results = au;Radcliffe Squires, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Mar. 5, 2019. See also *List of U.S. poets *List of literary critics References Notes External links ;Poems *Radcliffe Squires at the Poetry Foundation ;Books *Radcliffe Squires at Amazon.com ;About * Essay on Radcliffe Squires Emblems of the Sacred: Christian and Pre-Christian Imagery in Radcliffe Squires' Lyrical Poems" * Blog on Radcliffe Squires on HuffingtonPost.com http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tamsin-smith/poetry-on-the-wing_b_6920052.html Category:1917 births Category:1993 deaths Category:American male poets Category:American literary critics Category:Harvard University alumni Category:University of Michigan faculty Category:20th-century American poets Category:Writers from Salt Lake City Category:Poets from Utah Category:American naval personnel of World War II Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:20th-century American male writers Category:University of Utah alumni Category:20th-century American non-fiction writers Category:American male non-fiction writers Category:20th-century poets Category:American academics Category:American poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets